|
|
|---|
Thursday, July 16, 2009
More at Zennie62.com | Follow me on Twitter! | Get my widget!
YouTube , Metacafe, DailyMotion, Blip.tv, Sclipo and Viddler
Who's on the "Top 10" list of Twitter users in Oakland, Los Angeles, and San Francisco? There's no question but that Twitter, the microblogging service, has become a "must be on" new media system with an engaged and loyal core group of users, all microblogging about events, activities, news and opinion. The San Francisco-based firm has grown from small beginnings just three years ago to 19 million visitors (or 17 million if one goes by the digital research service ComScore.com) in April in what was a dramatic 83 percent jump over March, and in that month alone Twitter went from 9.8 million visitors to 17 million visitors, perhaps the fastest expansion of a new media service in the short history of the industry. It's clear that Twitter, as Eric Schonfeld with the tech industry website TechCrunch.com said, is working to become "the pulse of the planet."
As Twitter has grown so have the number of ways of measuring a twitter account holders effectiveness, or "Twitterers" as I call us. Perhaps the best Twitterer evaluation system is "Twitter Grader" made by self-described "serial entrepreneur" Dharmesh Shah. I am rather addicted to his application because it not only lets one know how effective they are on Twitter, but how they rank in their city, which is the most fun part of it all. In his blog at the site, Mr. Shah or "dshah" as he goes by explains how the final Twitter Grade is calculated:
1. Number of Followers: More followers leads to a higher Twitter Grade (all other things being equal). Yes, I agree that it’s easy to game this number, but we are looking at measuring reach and I did say all other things being equal.
2. Power of Followers: If you have people with a high Twitter Grade following you, it counts more than those with a low Twitter Grade following you. It’s a bit recursive, and we don’t get carried away with it, but it helps.
2. Updates: More updates generally leads to a higher grade — within reason. This does not mean you should be tweeting like a manic squirrel cranked up on caffeine and sugar. It won’t help either your Twitter Grade or your overall happiness in life.
3. Update Recency: Users that are more current (i.e. time elapsed since last tweet is low) generally get higher grades.
4. Follower/Following Ratio: The higher the ratio, the better. However, the weight of this particular factor decreases as the user accrues points for other factors (so, once a user gets to a high level of followers or a high level of engagement, the Follower/Following ratio counts less).
5. Engagement: The more a given user’s tweets are being retweeted, the more times the user is being referenced or cited, the higher the twitter grade. Further, the value of the engagement is higher based on who is being engaged. If a user with a very high Twitter Grade retweets, it counts more than if a spammy account with a very low grade retweets.
As you can guess, one's Twitter grade can be all over the place. As of this writing, mine is 99.8, which means out of out of 2,747,790 Twitters, there are just 4,953 who are better than me at this point in time. But a month ago my grade was 99.9 and last week it was 99.7. But since I'm hyper competitive, adding followers at a regular daily clip, I want to know where I stand in Oakland, California, where I live. With that, here are the top 10 users on Twitter who live in Oakland, followed by Los Angeles, then San Francisco, and listed by name, grade, and number of followers:
Oakland
1. mistahfab - 100 - 22,270
2. acedtect - 99.99 - 16,070
3. mollywood - 99.98 - 20,394
4. mrdaveyd - 99.9 - 3,094
5. bulldogreporter - 99.8 - 1,736
6. pandora_radio - 99.9 - 26,434
7. zennie62 - 99.8 - 5,988
8. ktvu - 99.8 - 2,445
9. mc_lars - 99.8 - 3,912
10. stocktwits - 99.8 - 85,623
Los Angeles
1. christinelu - 100 - 10,760
2. ijustine - 100 - 601,005
3. wilw - 100 - 958,546
4. laist - 100 - 7,398
5. mattsingley - 100 - 18,166
6. drew - 100 6,003
7. Mayhemstudios - 100 - 30,569
8. eonline - 100 - 1,040,375
9. lotay - 100 - 56,319
10. mitchelmusso - 100 - 211,947
San Francisco
1. missrogue - 100 - 28,127
2. briansolis - 100 - 27,621
3. ev - 100 - 1,095,917
4. parislemon - 100 - 10,084
5. Techmeme - 100 - 14,604
6. wired - 100 - 71,402
7. kynamdoan - 100 - 23,681
8. loic - 100 - 28,743
9. widgetbox - 100 - 14,093
10. gigaom - 99.99 - 5,674
Oh, and just for grins, the top 10 Twitter cities are:
1 London H9 United Kingdom 63.53
2 Los Angeles CA United States 70.80
3 Chicago IL United States 67.08
4 New York NY United States 71.52
5 San Francisco CA United States 74.00
6 Toronto 08 Canada 67.12
7 Atlanta GA United States 70.60
8 Seattle WA United States 67.91
9 Boston MA United States 69.14
10 Austin TX United States 69.98
Nope, Oakland's not on the list.
Top Cities have celebrity Twitterers
You may wonder why Los Angeles and San Francisco have so many Twitterers with 100 grades. The answer's a simple one: the vast majority of them are celebrities and micro celebrities who have vastly more followers than people they follow. In San Francisco, the number-one-ranked "missrogue" is Tara Hunt's the queen of online community consultants, and just wrote a book called "The Whuffie Factor" about how to improve one's use of social networks. "EV" in San Francisco is Twitter CEO Evan Williams, who has over a million followers. In Los Angeles, "iJustine" (Justine Ezarik) has over 600,000 followers and that number's sure to grow because today she's a "trending topic" on Twitter due to her new live show on USTream.Tv and as I watch this, she's actively trying to push "Harry Potter" out of the way for the number one topic spot today.
Twitter Influncers
What all of this says is if you want your message to get out a large audience you have to work with these Twitterers or become one of them. When one gets over 2,000 followers, and updates over 10 times a day, they can cause others to share their news and information in a process called "retweeting". Or think of how Ellen DeGeneres used her 1.9 million followers to gain signatures for an online petition to stop the proposal to reduce the time animals are held in shelters before being euthanized. Some question the value of Twitter, but those who do, universally also just aren't good at it.
Oakland needs to grow more celebrity Twitterers, and of the top 10 in Oakland only DaveyD and myself are consistent bloggers. Considering the number of bloggers in Oakland, that's a shame. Maybe I should move to San Francisco or Atlanta. And on that, one can make a strong argument that the top Twitter cities are also the best ones for the consumption of online content.
Labels: twitter
Saturday, June 20, 2009
More at Zennie62.com | Follow me on Twitter! | Get my widget!'
On YouTube.com
So a few days ago I wrote a blog post with a vlog about the Iran Elections or given what's going on over there the "Iran Revolution" and in preparing for it ran across an article who's take on Twitter, the main event in the Iran uprising, I disagreed with. It was written by Kara Swisher, the semi-well-known Wall Street Journal vlogger who covers "All Things D" or "Digital" as her blog site's called.
I wrote:
The amount of information communicated through Twitter has been of stagger proportions. While Kara Swisher may write that it's "inane and half-baked", the fact that Iranians can use their cell phones to tweet information and share photos has done more than the mainstream media in telling the World what's happening.
Well that sent her into a tizzy. She got on Twitter and publicly blasted me, writing things like:
karaswisher@zennie62 "inane and half-baked" were NOT my words and you said they were. I said it was simple which is different. Are you all-baked?
At first, I looked at her words with empathy and offered to make a correction, even though I totally disagree with her take. As a response, she wrote:
karaswisher@zennie62 it is not a favor to me for you to make an alteration. You attributed a quote to me I did not say. You made an error, so fix it.
After that, I reconsidered. After all it's my view, my opinion, and it's not against her at all. I like Kara's work and her -- not met her yet. But that doesn't mean I have to agree with everything she writes. In this case, no the words were not Kara's but she used them as a device to make a point and it's the use of the term I take issue with, as she didn't back away from it in her blog post.
And her title did use the words Inane and Half-baked. Maybe she'll go back and change it (please don't), but that's what was there.
So Kara, it wasn't personal. Ok? Twitter is a complex system to me. The rules of engagement on how to gain followers, following the right people, improving one's reach; that's a complex set of relationships in my view.
Twitter's not simple, and it's indeed revolutionary.
Labels: iran, twitter, zennie abraham
Friday, June 12, 2009
More at Zennie62.com | Follow me on Twitter! | Get my widget!
Important: Tell Gov. Arnold not to limit time animals are kept in shelters from 6 days to 3. Email him: http://www.gov.ca.gov Pass it on.
In other words, what the Governor's proposing is that an animal that currently has just six days time in an animal shelter before it is sentenced to death by euthanasia would have only three days time if the Guv gets his reported wish, which, as Franny Syufy informs us on her blog is...
barely time for owners to discover their cat missing, track him down to a local shelter, then arrange for his release.Why the Governors' people decided to pick on defenseless animals is beyond me, but they did it and it's out in the open. So much so that several Internet petitions have been established and DeGeneres has employed her vast new media reach - including her Facebook page - to spread the word in the hopes of turning around the Governor's apparent position.
So far the Guv's Twitter updates don't include any word on his personal view on the matter, but this online movement's just hit Twitter with full-force, thanks to Ellen.
Stay tuned.
Labels: arnold schwartzenegger, ellen, news, twitter



